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As we have seen with regard to the philosophical notion of agency, lack of reason entailed lack of will, and without will there could be no agency. From looking at the language of legal texts, it seems that such philosophical concepts had been ported across in an unadulterated fashion. ‘What the madman shared with the infant was not a recognized disease or malady or measured deficiency. It was, rather, the unfitness of both for citizenship, and the fact that punishment would do nothing to improve them.’ 121 The free citizen had the capacity, under the discipline
of birth, official citizenship, geography, or bloodline – this, too, is why those in America who identified as Norwegian and Swedish could claim Leif Eiriksson, who settled in Greenland, and whose parents were born in Norway and Iceland, as their Norse ancestor, with few qualms. Mayor Harrison understood the power and malleability of identity performance, and exemplified the Chicagoan embrace of verbal bluster, re-enactment, spectacle, and transformative mythmaking. So when the ship Viking sailed into Chicago, as the Tribune records, of course Mayor Harrison
Sam] said, ‘is Leif the Lucky . He is the first settler of the United States. He is its first citizen. He acquired his citizenship by being the first man to cross the churning waves of the Atlantic Ocean and to discover this continent.… And the child over there is Snorri Þorfinnsson . He is the first “indigenous” citizen of the United States. Leif the Lucky and Snorri Þorfinnsson are my forefathers.’ 47 Uncle Sam then lists several more of his illustrious ancestors, including William the Conqueror and Cnut (Canute) the Great, concluding that he – that is, the
. 55 Jean-Philippe Laurenceau et al., ‘Intimacy as an interpersonal process: current status and future directions’, in Debra J. Mashek and Arthur Aron (eds), Handbook of closeness and intimacy (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), pp. 61–78, at 62. 56 Ken Plummer, Intimate citizenship: private decisions and public dialogues (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press
gestures outwards.’14 Unlike the journey of the Hugin, then, Refugee Tales used medieval culture as a resource that might expand, rather than limit, the possibilities of the present. Like Drift, Refugee Tales demonstrates how engagement with medieval structures might radically disrupt modern habits and assumptions. In his theorisation of the migrant, Thomas Nail explores how the migrant subverts many of the assumptions of modern citizenship. As he writes, ‘Place-bound membership in a society is assumed as primary; secondary is the movement back and forth between social
and daughter with Sophie. With these five children Abraham and Sophie moved to Southampton in 1925. Abraham had not gone through the laborious and relatively expensive task of gaining naturalisation and thus Sophie, on marriage, lost her British citizenship. On 16 June 1925, therefore, she registered with Southampton Borough Police as an alien – under the Aliens Order, 1920, all permanent changes of residence had to be officially recorded. 16 Sophie’s daughter, who was a small child when her parents moved to Southampton, recalls that the dress shop was ‘not
principles, ‘they at once displayed all the qualities that make for good citizenship … and Portsmouth gladly bears testimony to the loyalty, the zeal, and the camaraderie of the entire community’. 9 Such mutual congratulation was to be replicated within Jewish historiography. In 1935, in a lecture in memory of the Jewish historian and daughter of Emanuel Emanuel, Lady Magnus, Cecil Roth paid tribute to the ‘notable share which the congregation played in the nineteenth century in civic life and in the movement for Jewish emancipation’. 10 Fifty years later, Aubrey
coming to the locality is highlighted – again the French Protestant refugees who came to Winchester in the late seventeenth century: In Catholic France in 1685, the Edict of Nantes, which tolerated Huguenot Protestants, was revoked. Cruel persecutions followed and large numbers fled to England. [James II] welcomed and protected them. There was a great influx of Protestant ‘asylum seekers’ into Winchester and the King supported them from his own purse, and began general subscription for their relief. He also rushed through citizenship for them at no expense. 299